My fav shots from Howl's Moving Castle

2023-07-23T10:21:00+03:00

I went to cinema with my gf 2 days ago. Howl's Moving Castle was on the theaters. It is a very good movie. Normally i almost don't watch anything twice since i know what happened and i already "understood" the movie. Yet i also wanted to watch this movie yet once again because my gf told me something i did not notice about the movie before. When i first watched the movie i mostly focused on Howl and how he was running away from his responsibilities. That was mostly what i noticed the first time. Then my gf told me that movie had a lot of stuff in it about how it is to live being "beautiful or ugly". Which i did not notice the first time. It caught my interest and i wanted to watch it again. At last we did watch it at theaters 2 days ago. Which is awesome :].

There are some spesific shots from the movie that i particularly have an interest on.

On this first one i like how the woman changes his direction once she notices Howl from the window. Her head is looking at the opposite side she walks which then she changes after a moment. Which just looks soo good to me :D.

I love this one. Sophie tries her hat and tries to look cute to herself despite not really thinking so that she looks cute. Just look at her expression xD

Now this one is very interesting. You see japanese animation mostly uses twos to animate scenes. Twos or threes not really much ones. However this scene is animated on ones. The reason is that the background is actually 3D and it moves on ones. Which it should because if it moved on twos it would hurt our eyes. So to keep the speed of the feet that step on the ground to matching to the background's speed the characters are also animated on ones. Now this could be avoided easily by just getting the camera just a little closer. This means that they wanted to make this exact shot. When i first saw this scene when i watched it on my pc monitor i actually did not like it that much. It just looks kind of weird seeing this animation animated on ones after seeing a lot of animation animated on twos. It just feels weird. However when i saw this scene at the theater it did not feel weird. It actually felt just right. Maybe the spacings are just too small to watch appropriately from an already small screen such as a monitor, or maybe the sheer size of the theater just makes it so that the sides of the screen is seen by my pheripherals rather than the center of my vision. Whatever it is it just feels soooo goood on theaters. So i am glad that i watched it at the cinema.

This one is also pretty interesting to me. There were a lot of 3D usage on the Howl's Moving Castle. However this one sticks to my eyes particularly more interesting. While all the other 3d scenes were quite special for themselves i think only this scene could only be done on 3D. No medium other than 3D could pull this off imo and i think this is a very important thing. To me every medium should be used to their own special extents. Making something do another thing which can already be done quite well with some else technique kind of feels like a waste of time. However if we culminate all of our effort to have a medium that can have it's own thing is way more important i think. People try to imitate 2d cel character animation with 3D cg or Ai. To be honest these are very short sighted attempts. Because we humans can already animate characters on cels PRETTY GOOD actually. So it is kind of pointless to try and replicate it on some else medium. However IMHO i never quite liked background cel animation. There are some interesting and good examples like on Soul Eater:

However when this technique tries to replicate realistic visuals it kind of honestly hurts my eyes. It just is too inconsistent to look realistic imo.

However in Howl's case they used a very good traditionally painted 3D models (this is all just a guess btw maybe they actually drew all of them by hand [impossible]) which looks extremely good while also being very consistent and replicating the round earth effect. I think this howl scene is just toooooo goooood and i do think that other mediums should be used by this mindset too.

I just like how Howl make a funny gist with his mouth like a little spoiled kid xD

SCENE BREAKDOWN | Rurouni Kenshin Tsuioku Hen | Assassination Scene

2023-07-20T10:21:00+03:00

Watch The Scene Here

The whole scene lasts 34 seconds. This is the single most favorite fight scene of all time for me in the world.

The act/play of the fight

What I like the most about the scene is that they are literally fighting. Fighting is a game in which both players are trying to subdue or kill each other. There are no pseudo achievements to achieve other than to win the game, which makes it great. Your techniques and strength do not matter as long as you don't win. So the most important condition is to win in a fight. In most fight scenes, not only in anime but in the whole media, most of the time the characters are not engaging in the game of fighting; rather, they are acting to fight. They are not trying to achieve the state of winning but rather seem like they are trying to achieve certain objectives that look like fighting.

So what makes this scene great apart from the fact that they are literally fighting? Well, it is because it is a **SHOW DO NOT TELL** scene. Even though the characters do not talk to each other at all, we can see and understand everything that happens in the fight. The character does not have to tell you what he does because you already see it anyway. You see, you understand, and an actual outcome comes at last at the end of the scene that means something for the story it happens in. Which makes it great. Because in most scenes, you cannot really see what is happening. If you somehow managed to see what is happening in the scene, you cannot really understand it, and if you even manage to do that, it does not make sense (the players do not actually engage in the activity of fighting, so the moves do not make sense in the context of fighting). Yet in this scene, everything is right before our eyes, and everything is understandable. If you do fight, you will understand that this is a great scene.

Let us break it down

Opening Move

So in the opening of the scene, Kenshin and the assassin have a face-off where they think about what to do next. The assassin decides that he will attack, and Kenshin simultaneously deflects that attack with his sword and counterattacks himself. Yet that was all a setup by the assassin. The assassin has a chained double wakizashi. So when he attacked by throwing one of his wakizashi, he actually set his main attack up. He knew that Kenshin would deflect it, so it was not a real attack but just a setup. The real attack was to get Kenshin tangled up in chains so he is vulnerable to attacks.

Setups

Setups are one thing that gets overlooked or done extremely badly in almost all media. A proper and experienced fight cannot happen without setups.

After a certain skill level, no one eats a vanilla punch. You have to set it up.

So in this scene, actually, Kenshin pretty much loses. He played right into his opponent's hands. He bit the bait and cannot do much at that moment. The rest is psychological. Instead of panicking and trying to get out of the bind quickly, Kenshin just waits until the assassin gives away.

The psychological counter-attack

End of the fight

Given Kenshin's situation, the assassin thinks that he completely has Kenshin in his hand at the moment and decides to finish the fight. So he jumps, expecting Kenshin to stay still. However, Kenshin was waiting for the assassin to give a moment for him to do something, and that is the moment. Since the assassin is mid-air, he cannot control Kenshin, but since Kenshin is grounded and he did not panic and make his situation worse, his footing is reasonably well, so he has control over the assassin at the moment. The moment the assassin jumps, Kenshin just pulls him by his own chains and attacks with his own chained wakizashi, ending the fight by dividing the assassin into two equal parts. This concludes with Kenshin winning the fight.

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